Is Beijing’s air pollution responsible for underwhelming recent work of one of China’s best-known movie directors?

Though he didn’t say so directly, Chen Kaige told reporters at the opening of this year’s big political conclave in Beijing the poor quality of the capital’s air had been making it hard for him to concentrate on his work.

“Cornered by the terrible weather, I have nowhere to go,” the official Xinhua news agency quoted Mr. Chen as saying on Sunday. “I am unable to focus on my artistic creation.”

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The director described air pollution as “appalling” and “unbelievable,” according to Xinhua.

With the high toxicity of China’s air, land and water making headlines and stirring up the country’s vocal social media users in recent months, activists have predicted environmental protection would dominate the agenda as Chinese officials, academics, celebrities and entrepreneurs pour into Beijing for political meetings this month.

Mr. Chen’s comments, delivered on the opening day of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress, suggest they may have been right.

The CPPCC is an advisory body that holds its national meeting in Beijing concurrently with the annual plenary session of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress. Once the NPC kicks off on Tuesday, the yearly political event known colloquially as the “Two Meetings” will be officially underway.

A newly elected CPPCC delegate, Mr. Chen is best known for directing “Farewell My Concubine,” a lushly shot love letter to Peking Opera that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993. His more recent films have failed to garner the same critical acclaim, though his latest, “Caught in the Web,” was a commercial success inside China.

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The China Central Television building is seen in heavy haze in Beijing in January.

Many in China have grown concerned with the degraded state of the country’s environment after decades of turbo-charged economic growth. A stretch of terrible air in Beijing in January, controversy last month over the government’s reluctance to release soil pollution data and various flare-ups over polluted water have galvanized the public and even inspired the country’s state media to question why more isn’t being done to protect the environment.

Mr. Chen is a Beijing native and has long been critical of the havoc economic development has wreaked on the city. Yet it’s not clear how much credibility he has as a spokesman for the environment. In 2005, the director and his crew found themselves at the center of what at the time was one of the country’s biggest environmental scandals: the trashing of a once pristine lake in southwestern China’s Yunnan province during the filming of “The Promise,” The film’s producers, including Mr. Chen’s wife, were later fined $11,250. When Mr. Chen was nominated for a “Green Chinese” award the next year, many cried foul.

“Sometimes a negative example can serve as a warning,” Wang Panpu, deputy director of the award committee, told Xinhua in explaining the nomination.

Then again, with air pollution in Chinese cities regularly reaching hazardous levels, green-minded residents are probably happy for all the celebrity firepower they can get.

“I was born and bred in Beijing. I know what the weather was like in the old days,” Mr. Chen told Xinhua on Sunday, citing the death two years ago of one of his prized jujube trees. “If a tree dies like this, how can humans fare any better?”

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